The Indiscreet Letter eBook

THE INDISCREET LETTER

The Railroad Journey was very long and slow.
The Traveling Salesman was rather short and quick.
And the Young Electrician who lolled across the car
aisle was neither one length nor another, but most
inordinately flexible, like a suit of chain armor.

More than being short and quick, the Traveling Salesman
was distinctly fat and unmistakably dressy in an ostentatiously
new and pure-looking buff-colored suit, and across
the top of the shiny black sample-case that spanned
his knees he sorted and re-sorted with infinite earnestness
a large and varied consignment of “Ladies’
Pink and Blue Ribbed Undervests.” Surely
no other man in the whole southward-bound Canadian
train could have been at once so ingenuous and so nonchalant.

There was nothing dressy, however, about the Young
Electrician. From his huge cowhide boots to the
lead smouch that ran from his rough, square chin to
the very edge of his astonishingly blond curls, he
was one delicious mess of toil and old clothes and
smiling, blue-eyed indifference. And every time
that he shrugged his shoulders or crossed his knees
he jingled and jangled incongruously among his coil-boxes
and insulators, like some splendid young Viking of
old, half blacked up for a modern minstrel show.

More than being absurdly blond and absurdly messy,
the Young Electrician had one of those extraordinarily
sweet, extraordinarily vital, strangely mysterious,
utterly unexplainable masculine faces that fill your
senses with an odd, impersonal disquietude, an itching
unrest, like the hazy, teasing reminder of some previous
existence in a prehistoric cave, or, more tormenting
still, with the tingling, psychic prophecy of some
amazing emotional experience yet to come. The
sort of face, in fact, that almost inevitably flares
up into a woman’s startled vision at the one
crucial moment in her life when she is not supposed
to be considering alien features.

Out from the servient shoulders of some smooth-tongued
Waiter it stares, into the scared dilating pupils
of the White Satin Bride with her pledged hand clutching
her Bridegroom’s sleeve. Up from the gravelly,
pick-and-shovel labor of the new-made grave it lifts
its weirdly magnetic eyes to the Widow’s tears.
Down from some petted Princeling’s silver-trimmed
saddle horse it smiles its electrifying, wistful smile
into the Peasant’s sodden weariness. Across
the slender white rail of an always out-going
steamer it stings back into your gray, land-locked
consciousness like the tang of a scarlet spray.
And the secret of the face, of course, is “Lure”;
but to save your soul you could not decide in any
specific case whether the lure is the lure of personality,
or the lure of physiognomy—­a mere accidental,
coincidental, haphazard harmony of forehead and cheek-bone
and twittering facial muscles.

Something, indeed, in the peculiar set of the Young
Electrician’s jaw warned you quite definitely
that if you should ever even so much as hint the small,
sentimental word “lure” to him he would
most certainly “swat” you on first impulse
for a maniac, and on second impulse for a liar—­smiling
at you all the while in the strange little wrinkly
tissue round his eyes.